7 ms·
This is pretty much the worst response possible. Hard bounces mean that email delivery services are going to start automatically removing, or at least stopping
by com2kid 6y ago
This is pretty much the worst response possible. Hard bounces mean that email delivery services are going to start automatically removing, or at least stopping delivery to, entire slews of email addresses.
A lot of clean up is going to be needed as a result of this.
To add some more details, when using a 3rd party email delivery service, those services will either black-list or just outright remove email addresses when they get a hard bounce "email address no longer exists" message back.
Some providers make re-adding an address after a hard bounce a non-trivial task, since after all, the authority on that email address just said it doesn't exist.
This is going to be really ugly.
- petercooper 6y agoYes. I email hundreds of thousands of Gmail users each week (yes, double opt in, they all want the mails!) and we immediately delete any user for whom any Gmail error comes up at all in order to keep a solid delivery record with them. Sounds like we might have deleted 80% of our list if we'd sent today..!
- com2kid 6y agoMy sanity tests started acting flaky ~3 hours ago, I never thought it was Gmail... Kind of happy I had to do something else and I didn't burn hours investigating.
- ta988 6y agoHope you have a backup just in case.
- petercooper 6y agoYes, we're unusual in not relying on third parties for list management. We can rollback. Or I might just comment out the 'unsub on hard bounce' code for the rest of the week..! :)
- Jap2-0 6y agoUnsub on two consecutive bounces seems more reasonable to catch flukes (or Gmail going down)?
- mehrdadn 6y agoLogically you'd expect unsubscribe to only act after lots of bounces of this format when the address has been receiving mail fine before. It also seems reasonable not to trust such bounces for the entire domain for a while when this happens to lots of other addresses that have worked fine before. Not that I expect software currently works this way, but it does seem like a common sense thing to code in.
- petercooper 6y agoI mean, it's possible, but you'd need to queue up a day's worth of bounces, do the analysis, and then handle the bounces asynchronously later on to do that. Most systems operate more immediately in isolation on individual addresses than that right now, because such analysis is generally not needed (until today, of course ;-)).
- mehrdadn 6y agoMail agents already queue emails that bounce though; it's a matter of changing the conditions for when you retry and/or unsubscribe. I imagine you can do the analysis in real time too... just look at the bounce and see if it pertains to an email you sent to in the past, and if so, increment some rolling counter for that domain.
- petercooper 6y agoYes, most likely! That is a common approach for 'soft bounces' in most list management systems (e.g. MailChimp). The problem here is Gmail has been throwing out "NoSuchUser" errors which are an instant unsub in most systems because Gmail takes repeated delivery to non-existing addresses into account for deliverability purposes. I'm extremely paranoid about email hygiene, tiny bounce rates and high delivery rates, so we aggressively unsubscribe troublesome addresses (often to the point of getting reader complaints about it) for many reasons beyond that, however.
- dathinab 6y agoSo new think to do: Quarantine addresses instead of deleting them and if for one provider most addresses fail don't give them another (maybe manually triggered) try later one. (And if no such thing is detected deleted quarantined mail addresses.)
- webbie917 6y agoMy guess is that how most email service providers handle this - they don't actually delete the email and just have a flag on it - bounced, complain, unsub. This way the list owner can run an export and see all the status code.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoI really cannot believe they did not immediately hack in a new rule to their SMTP server: never return a 5xx (permanent failure), instead return a 421 (temporary failure try again later). That simple fix buys them 24-72 hours to solve this properly. Yeah, it burdens servers sending mail to them because now they have to hold on to all mail (including mail that really is permanently undeliverable) for another day or so, but that's still better than what's happening right now.
- jeffbee 6y agoWhy would that be better than just shutting off the delivery stack altogether?
- shmoogy 6y ago5xx error results in suppression list addition of an email, so future emails won't be delivered (by most ESPs), and not returning MX response would probably be just as bad, or worse (or result in millions/billions of emails being re-queued due to timeouts?) His solution would result in exponential retry failures baked into most services, which would buy them a few hours, and result in no lost emails, and no suppression list additions.
- jeffbee 6y agoInability to contact the destination would be treated as a temp-failure by the origin, and taking the service off the air could be effected instantly.
- pmlnr 6y agoFailure of response from the server is nearly always treated as temp failure, because it could be down to network connectivity, name resolution, etc. That is a better scenario, than 5xx.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoIn case less than 100% of gmail is experiencing this bug.
- marvion 6y agoMailgun send a warning mail about increased bounces from our account. Sure, they know what's going on... but we send 4-5 digit mails per hour - it's a lot of bounces That means I can't just resend the the emails blindly, because I'm too scared to trigger some sort of automatic suspension... (I don't do this regularly, so I'm not familiar with all features... additional mail verification could help probably ....)